To Create Jobs, Build Public Transit, Not Highways

If we’d spent as much federal stimulus money on public transportation as we spent on highways, we would have created twice as much work and put a bigger dent in the unemployment rate.

That’s the analysis of stimulus spending by Smart Growth America, the Center for Neighborhood Technology and U.S. PIRG, the public-policy lobbying group. Smart Growth America found that every billion dollars spent on public transportation produced 16,419 job-months, while the same amount spent on highway infrastructure projects produced 8,781 job-months. Now it is warning that the Jobs for Main Street Act of 2010 (.pdf), the $154 billion jobs bill the House of Representatives passed last month, could make the same mistake in funding the wrong priorities.

The legislation, which the Senate is expected to take up early this year, would finance everything from renovating schools to putting more cops on the street. It is funded in part with money set aside for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, also known as the Wall Street bailout. The bill allocates $27.1 billion for highways and other surface transportation and just $8.4 billion for public transportation.

That’s a mistake.

“When the Senate takes the bill up and it goes back to the House, they ought to take a look at their own data and readjust the proportions,” William Schroeer, state policy director for Smart Growth America, told Wired.com. “Since it’s a jobs bill, that seems to us to be something they ought to think very seriously about.”

By splitting public transportation and highway funding equally, Schroeer said, the bill could provide 71,415 more job-months of work than it would by favoring highway spending. That is enough work to give 6,000 more people full-time year-round employment.

According to SGA, public transportation spending leads more directly to job growth than highway spending for several reasons. First, less money is spent acquiring land, which means more money is spent actually building something. Second, all those buses, trains and subways need people to operate them and maintain the infrastructure. And third, public transit requires a workforce with more diverse skills than highway construction.

Even better, Schroeer said, public transit can help save jobs because it allows people to get to work — and those are jobs Smart Growth America didn’t include in its analysis. When transit programs are cut or don’t exist to begin with, “there’s a negative impact on folks’ mobility to get to work, to get to education,” Schroeer said. “It’s part of the fabric of communities, whether you use it or not.”

One reason public transit got short shrift in the stimulus package and some policymakers don’t see the merit of such projects is the misconception that transit projects aren’t “shovel-ready,” and — as a result — job growth would lag. The report proves that myth wrong.

“In today’s environment, there are so many public transportation needs, and as a result there are so many public transportation projects that are ready to go, there’s no difference in the spend rates between roads and public transportation,” Schroeer said.

The federal money being thrown around in Washington includes a provision that a debt-ridden transit agency can’t use it to pay off existing liabilities or, say, build a new subway line it will have to shut it down when operating expenses become cost-prohibitive. That provides a measure of assurance that the money will be spent creating jobs and financing sustainable transit projects.

“The federal assistance that’s being discussed could be used for a number of things, but debt is not one of them.” Schroeer said. “You only get reimbursed for capital construction, maintenance or preventative maintenance — and you can spend 10 percent of the capital on operating expenses. None of that is debt.”

The bottom line is, investing heavily in public transportation puts more people to work while creating or improving infrastructure we need more of. It’s a win-win.

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